


The Void of the Unknown

by StuckySituation



Series: The Gift of a Clean Slate (it's a Trojan horse) [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Amnesiac Steve Rogers, Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, Canon Temporary Character Death, Characters Reading Fanfiction, Characters Writing Fanfiction, Coping, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Still not the happy ending here, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-08 04:18:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17974352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StuckySituation/pseuds/StuckySituation
Summary: Steve mourns what he doesn't remember.---Steve had jumped straight into his new role as Captain America, with only a fleeting thought spared to the people he might have known before the serum.It had been easy to dismiss those hypothetical people little Steve Rogers might have had, but now, after reading about Bucky Barnes, after looking at all the photos where little Steve Rogers stands in the midst of the people who used to mean something to him, and after listening to Barnes family reminiscence about Steve... these people are no longer nameless, faceless, or hypothetical at all.Steve knows he’s getting obsessed over his lost past. He doesn’t care.





	The Void of the Unknown

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, so this fic is _not_ the second chance or the happy ending everyone asked for after the first part -- this is simply about Steve and how he copes with the shock of finding out about his lost 25 years.
> 
> Not as angsty as the first part, I'd like to say -- I didn't cry while writing this! Yay! I actually feel kinda in peace now which is a whole lots better feeling than _'bleeding from open heart wound'_ as I felt like after the first part! -- but don't quote me on that /o\ It's grieving fic, still. Just, with some fluffies and a little bit humor in.
> 
>  **Canon Temporary Character Death** is simply a nod towards Bucky's fall from the train; Steve thinks he's dead (spoiler: no he isn't :P), and this whole fic centers around Steve mourning him.

 

 

Steve had jumped straight into his new role as Captain America, with only a fleeting thought spared to the people he might have known before the serum.

 

It had been easy to dismiss those hypothetical people little Steve Rogers might have had, but now, after reading about Bucky Barnes, after looking at all the photos where little Steve Rogers stands in the midst of the people who used to mean something to him, and after listening to Barnes family reminiscence about Steve... these people are no longer nameless, faceless, or hypothetical at all.

 

He should have worried more about them. He should have ignored the orders about keeping his identity a secret from the public; he should have gone straight to Brooklyn after he got the serum, to try to find people who used to know him.

 

Steve is a man out of time, rootless and homeless, a man without past; everyone seems to talk about him like that after his defrosting, unaware that it had been true for him, as far as he’s concerned, _always._

 

The only thing Steve has ever known is war, one way or the another, both as part of the war propaganda back in States, and as the supersoldier and the weapon in Europe.

 

He didn’t care back then. He had felt proud of being able to focus on what was important. He had felt no need to wallow on his lost past. Little Steve Rogers had wanted nothing more than prove himself and join the war, and Steve had done nothing but tried to prove himself as good and brave man as that little spitfire from Brooklyn had been.

 

Steve thinks darkly that he really managed to live up to little Steve Rogers’ shadow. Little Steve Rogers sacrificed himself without a thought for how it could affect his loved ones -- but had Steve been any better? No. He had continued in little Steve Rogers’ footsteps, never questioning or doubting his commitment in blindly doing so.

 

He hadn’t even managed to see what or who had been right in front of him for over a year. He had taken Sergeant James Barnes for granted.

 

Steve feels sick thinking about their time in the woods. For Steve it had been a surprise and nice, sure, but on the grand scale of things almost insignificant event. Two soldiers snapping behind the enemy lines and getting some relief from the stress. When James pushed him away afterwards and made it clear that nothing like it was going to happen again between them, Steve hadn’t pushed back. He had accepted that it was going to be their little secret that they were never going to talk about. There were more important things to focus on. They were in the middle of the war, after all.

 

Steve remembers the desperation behind James’ kiss and the tears that had confused Steve. He can only imagine what that one stolen moment had meant for James.

 

Little Steve Rogers threw his past away and sacrificed himself for a chance of becoming supersoldier, while Sergeant James Barnes threw away his chance for honorable discharge and sacrificed himself to save Steve’s moronic, amnesiac ass. Steve is done following his past self’s example. Avoiding thinking about his lost years had brought him no good.

 

\---

 

Steve sits down and starts to draw, his heart beating significantly faster than his usual, unnaturally low resting heart rate. Instead of letting himself idly doodle, he sets his pen on the paper with a clear goal in his mind, and prays for a miracle.

 

He never let himself explore this during the war, didn’t realize the true significance behind his random doodles. He sketched a smile here and a wink there, but never had concentrated on putting them together to complete the picture.

 

The familiar shapes come from his backbone; it’s like writing, where one doesn’t have to stop to think about how to get the As and the Bs on the paper and how to make them form the words.

 

When the lines start to form a recognizable person, Steve needs to take a break so he doesn’t mess up the sketch with his shaking hands.

 

\---

 

When he’s done, he has his first true glimpse of Bucky (he’s not counting the stiff posturings for cameras in family photos as kids) -- because this man, who’s lying on his side on bed, only half-awake but already smiling softly to Steve is so clearly _‘Bucky’_ and not the James that Steve knew that it hurts. Steve stares at the black and white sketch, doesn’t dare to touch it in case he smudges the fragile lines.

 

He doesn’t know how long he stares at the sketch, willing himself to _remember,_ to remember _anything,_ to get even a tiniest spark of that lost memory back.

 

He gets nothing; no memory of what this man was like, what he would have said or done next in that moment. James that Steve knew was always so closed off, and it’s hard to believe that he could have ever looked like this man in the sketch.

 

Well. Steve doesn’t even know for sure that this moment is something that actually ever happened; maybe it had been only little Steve Rogers’ secret fantasy that he used to draw, over and over again, until it was carved deep in his muscle memory.

 

Steve doesn’t know how to feel about that -- to be relieved or disappointed about the possibility that perhaps little Steve and Bucky had never been more than friends -- but then Steve reminds himself of how natural it had felt to kiss James. It hadn’t been their first kiss or first time together; Steve can see it clearly now, in hindsight. And Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes used to live together before the war...

 

So yes, this moment here, right after Bucky has woken up, must have happened. More than once. And little Steve Rogers must have drawn it more than a few times for Steve to be able to still draw it.

 

Steve doesn’t remember. No matter how he reaches, he just _doesn’t._ But he can imagine it. He can imagine the little Steve Rogers waking up first, and quietly, to not wake up Bucky, taking his sketchbook from the nightstand. To draw his friend, his _lover._ Bucky, waking up, and silently watching Steve sketch him. Smiling and waiting patiently for Steve to notice that he’s awake.

 

This, this right here, was a glimpse to something lost forever that little Steve Rogers had and then threw away for the serum.

 

Steve stares at the sketch. He plays over and over his first meeting with Sergeant Barnes, then their first real conversation in the London.

 

_“I volunteered for it.”_

 

_“Of course you did,” James muttered._

 

Steve yearns to know what had been behind those words. How was James able to forgive little Steve Rogers? How had he not only forgiven him, but followed Steve back into the war? How had he not hated Steve?

 

Maybe he had. Steve remembers the way James never let him close, held the firm wall between them, the dark glares that Steve sometimes got when James got stuck in his dark moods.

 

Steve had thought James as an impossible man to get close to, as a man who preferred to keep others at distance, but now, looking at the man on the paper who’s relaxed and smiling, who looks so content and in love, Steve regrets that he didn’t try harder to break through his walls. He doesn’t know what he would have found, but he regrets that he didn’t try to find out harder.

 

\---

 

Steve takes copies of the sketch, applies spray fixative on the original one (the miracles of the modern era never cease to impress him), and laminates them all before putting them in frames. He puts one on his nightstand, and the rest he stores carefully around the apartment in small packages, with thick layers of newspapers wrapped around the frames.

 

Just in case. What if his skill fades away one day? What if one day he won’t remember anymore how to draw Bucky?

 

The thought makes him want to upload the sketch on the internet, to pay for it to be stored on dozens of data centers all around the world with the maximum security and automatic backups. (Steve had taken his time to research the internet to understand what it was and how it worked; after a week of research and watching documentaries he had a suspicion that he understood it better than most people who had grown up with it and who took it all for granted -- after all, one doesn’t need to know the magic behind a remote to be able to switch between the channels of TV.)

 

But there are too many pieces online of his art from back before the war. Even though none of Steve’s publicly known and readily available drawings are of Bucky, Steve has a distinctive enough style that someone could recognize him as the artist.

 

He doesn’t want to take any chances of this sketch getting found (he might understand basic principles of internet, but these _‘hackers’_ and _‘crackers’_ sound worrisome), and of people making the connection between him and it.

 

Steve can imagine the horror of having to face his sketch of Bucky over and over again in interviews, with curious people prodding and asking him about the story behind it when Steve doesn’t know it any better than them.

 

\---

 

He manages to sketch a couple more drawings of Bucky; one with Bucky smiling like he’s holding onto a secret, his head tilted and his eyes half-lidded in a way that can only be described as coquettish; and the another one where he looks much more innocent, but just as happy as in the previous ones, with his whole face smiling, _beaming,_ with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and his lips slightly parted like he’s ready to tell the punch line for a hilarious joke.

 

Steve gives these sketches the same treatment as the first one; he takes copies, sprays the original ones with the fixative, laminates and frames each one of them.

 

He half-seriously considers searching for secret, abandoned vaults to hide the copies in, just in case something happened to his apartment.

 

After a moment of entertaining the thought, and becoming more and more anxious about the thought of a random villain setting his apartment in fire, Steve starts to google and finds about self storage renting.

 

It has same dangers as uploading the sketches online. But the more Steve thinks about it, the more he realizes how much he would hate to lose these fragile sketches -- and how, frankly, having everyone know about them is _nothing_ when compared to that possibility.

 

There’s nothing left of Bucky or of _them_ but old photographs, interviews from his family -- and these sketches. Steve can’t turn back time and go change how things turned out, he can’t resurrect Bucky and apologize for him, he can’t get his lost 25 years back, he can’t go back and prevent Bucky from falling off the train... but he can do his best to hold onto what little there is left of Bucky.

 

Steve had sacrificed whatever they had had together, and hadn’t even known to mourn it -- he had left all of that pain for Bucky, who, for one reason or the another, had decided to carry it alone. And still Bucky picked up Steve’s shield and gave his life to protect Steve in that train.

 

The very least that Steve can do is to protect the tiny crumbs that are left of the man. More that he thinks about it, the more convinced he is that the right thing to do would be to upload the sketches all over the internet, on forums and social media, do his best to make sure that they will never disappear, no matter how awkward it would make things for Steve.

 

He’s not ready for that, not ready to voluntarily share this Bucky with the world and face the questions, but he makes a compromise with himself. He rents three self-storage lockers from three different states, and then starts to research in more detail AWS, Stark Industry Cloud Services, Azure Cloud Services, and other possibilities for backuping the sketches online as securely as possibly.

 

He has money from back pay, and he’s ready to use it; and if it runs out, he’ll figure out ways to earn more.

 

\---

 

The internet has, of course, a lot more on offer than just interviews, family photographs, wikipedia pages, and a global cloud storage system that has his three precious sketches backed up on three different continents.

 

There are articles on the internet titled _‘Cook like Captain! Top ten recipes from 1940s’_ that speculate on what the diet was back then and how often Steve and Bucky ate boiled potatoes.

 

There are hundreds of playlists made, with themes like _‘What songs Cap listened to growing up?’_ and _‘Modern music that Captain America would have approved’._

 

There are photographs of Brooklyn. Maps with ‘points of interest’ and ‘fun facts’ made of little Steve Rogers’ neighborhood. There’s a virtual 360 tour on official Captain America site of their Depression era apartment.

 

Steve knows he’s getting obsessed over his lost past. He doesn’t care. He cooks the recipes, he listens to the music, he prints out all the photographs and maps he finds. Nothing sparks recognition within him, but he collects and assembles together as much as he can; no fact or a piece of history is too tiny to be considered insignificant.

 

\---

 

One day, there’s Tony Stark in his fancy suit and obnoxious sunglasses in Steve’s apartment when he gets back from his run.

 

Steve’s annoyed. They aren’t friends, and his space is _his._

 

Stark doesn’t look up when Steve passes the living room. He’s going through Steve’s vinyls, checking the cover pictures.

 

“Is there a good reason why you’re here?” Steve asks him, but continues his way to the kitchen to get a cola. “If you’re looking for song recommendations, you should have texted.”

 

Stark clears his throat, and with a raised voice answers from the living room: “I overheard my father and Aunt Peggy talking about you and your buddy when I was a kid. You do know that she didn’t hold anything from you on purpose?”

 

Steve pauses. Then he closes the fridge door carefully, and with the limonade in hand _(‘Limited Captain America Coca-Cola Retro Edition!’)_ he walks back out of the kitchen. He stops in the doorway and leans against the doorframe, takes a sip of the limonade (it doesn’t taste any better than the modern version; he’s glad he bought only one bottle) and looks at Stark carefully.

 

Stark is still standing next to Steve’s vinyl collection and gramophone (Steve had to watch a youtube video on how to use it). He’s looking at Steve with a face that’s inscrutable.

 

Steve is, oddly enough, not reminded of Howard Stark as he takes in Stark’s wary and closed off expression. He’s reminded of James, who kept his thoughts and emotions behind a thick wall. And even more than that, he’s reminded of _Morita,_ who used to silently see and understand a lot more than he usually let on.

 

Steve remembers who exactly mentioned his wikipedia page to him, not long after their first battle as Avengers. Of course, it had been part of a snarky jibe, and Steve had fumed about the entitlement and arrogance in how Stark spoke to him in condescending tone about how there was this thing called _internet_ and maybe Steve should check it out (Steve knew about it already); how Steve’s _wikipedia page_ was the most nauseating piece of nostalgic propaganda that Stark had ever read.

 

Steve _had_ gone to check out this ‘wikipedia’ afterwards, because that _had_ been a new thing for him. Then he had become preoccupied by what he found, and forgot to think twice about who had nudged him towards finding more about his lost past long before anyone had had a chance to surprise Steve out of the blue by bringing up ‘Bucky Barnes’.

 

Steve looks Stark up and down, and revises his understanding of the man.

 

“I know,” Steve finally says. “She wasn’t that kind of person.”

 

Stark makes a small, sharp nod. “Good. I didn’t want you to be-- I don’t know, _bitter_ or angry at her.”

 

“I’m not.” He pauses, and then continues: “And I’m not angry at your father, either. Nobody knew about the side-effects, and I _did_ volunteer knowing that anything could go wrong.” There was a recording of him, just before the serum. Little Steve Rogers went in that machine out of his own will. There’s only one person that Steve blames for the serum.

 

Stark makes another sharp nod, and then pulls out his phone to type something. “They got their hands on bunch of your old stuff after the war. Father stored it all for you. He wanted to keep your things for you, in case you were ever found. If you’re interested-”

 

 _“Yes,”_ Steve interrupts quickly, firmly. “Yes, I am.”

 

“Thought so. There’s not much. One sketchbook, but it was already in bad shape when he got it and so it’s far from top shape-”

 

“I don’t care,” Steve says. “Where are these things?”

 

“They’ll be all delivered here by the evening,” Stark says and puts his phone away. “Okay, that’s all I came here for. See you later, Cap, and hopefully not too soon. I have happy plans scheduled for the next month, plans without aliens or working with depressive colleagues with secret sob story backgrounds. Aliens I can handle, the latter gives me ulcers.”

 

Stark is almost at the front door when Steve calls after him: “Wait.”

 

Stark pauses and groans. “I’m a busy man, Cap, what is it?”

 

Steve doesn’t _get_ Tony Stark, but he knows at least something about men living behind masks and foot thick defensive walls. One such man had scowled at him and kissed him; this one here is taunting Steve and riling him up while giving him back pieces of his past.

 

The first one Steve had shrugged off as an impossible, grumpy man to get to know. With this one… Steve realizes it’s up to him to set them on a path towards less antagonistic colleagueship as teammates.

 

Steve smiles at him and says sincerely, “Thank you, Tony.”

 

Tony stares at him and then shudders. “No. Don’t thank me. _That_ gives me even more ulcers.”

 

“You’re a good man.”

 

Tony leaves the apartment hastily, and yells from the stairway: _“Bye,_ Cap!”

 

\---

 

The sketchbook among the stuff is older than Steve had anticipated; the drawings and doodles are clearly done by a child. Steve is disappointed.

 

Still, it’s more than he had in the morning. There are sketches of toys and of a boy who could be Bucky (Steve’s artistic skills clearly weren’t natural talent, so it’s hard to tell). There are strange dragons flying above mountains, and people with swords and bows fighting monsters. There are few drawings done by someone else (the style is unmistakably different); one of them looks like a caricature of Steve, fists up and fighting a dinosaur.

 

They are not much different than some of the drawings already circulating around in the internet, but Steve scans each page carefully and prints out the copies. He gets four copies of everything; one copy of each to store at home along the original sketchbook, and the rest to take to his self-storage lockers.

 

As he does it, he decides to print out every sketch and drawing on the internet on the same go. And for the first time, he ends up paying closer attention to all the art that _others_ have created of him… and Bucky.

 

\---

 

Steve knew already about official comics, cartoons, newsreels, and movies, of course he had. But finding about how _much_ there’s _fan made_ art is… mindblowing.

 

And finding out that a certain, not at all small, niche has a soft spot for him and Bucky _as a couple…_

 

Steve upgrades his cloud storage space and buys more ink and paper for his printer. Then he sits down in front of his computer and lets himself get lost in all the ways the people have imagined him and Bucky.

 

There is so much art, ranging from cute ‘chibi’ characters to painstakingly realistic portraits. People have drawn their first kiss, their first meeting, their happy reunion after the Azzano, the two of them leading the Howlies. They have drawn them spending Christmas together, they have drawn them happy and in love, in Coney Island trading kisses, in Stark Expo taking photos in photo booth, in 21st century as a modern young couple, even adventuring with spaceships.

 

There are darker and less happy pieces too; Steve sitting alone and mourning Bucky after his death, Steve putting down the plane while thinking about Bucky, Bucky hallucinating Steve while prisoner in Azzano, the two of them fighting about their relationship (one or the other claiming that they shouldn’t be together, and how the other deserves to find happiness without living in a fear together), the two of them running away from cops during a queer bar raid in 1940s.

 

Some of the art Steve loves, some of it not. He prints it all out and saves everything in cloud anyway, no matter how realistic or unrealistic, how happy or painful.

 

\---

 

Finding about fanart was eye opening experience. Until that moment, he had focused on collecting _facts._ Little pieces of history.

 

There’s no historical value in a digital painting of Bucky as a green alien prince and Steve as the first man on Mars, but that doesn’t mean that Steve can’t appreciate the piece. Ironically, Prince Bucky’s bemused expression at seeing a human being for the first time and Steve’s self-confident smile and outstretched hand manage to unwittingly capture their reunion in Italy better than any other piece that Steve has seen so far.

 

Steve thinks about drawing up his own past himself, making up his own happy fanarts, but when he starts to draw, it’s James he ends up drawing. James as he knew the man; competent and capable, closed off and gloomy.

 

Drawing James is both easy and the hardest thing he has ever done, but he’s compelled to draw him in all the ways he can remember; standing on watch, running beside Steve, setting up his tent, sitting around the campfire with the other Howlies, hunched over his mug in a pub, yelling at Steve about something, cleaning and reassembling his gun...

 

With painstaking care and detail he draws James as he remembers him in that brief moment when his walls crumbled and he looked up to Steve in the woods, a moment before their kiss.

 

Steve tries to sit down to draw Bucky from before war again, but his pen hovers above the paper and he feels uncomfortable about it. What right does he have to draw their past? He threw his memories away, he made such a harsh decision alone for both of them, and now he has nerve to think that he could ever imagine even a glimpse of it on his own?

 

He doesn’t try to draw Bucky again. It’s different, easier, to view others’ art of their pre-war times together. He keeps drawing James instead.

 

\---

 

Natasha is paying him a rare social call. When Steve gets back from the bathroom, she’s flipping through his sketchbook filled with James.

 

Steve stretches his hand and looks at her pointedly, with his best _‘Captain America Disapproves’_ face on. “Snooping is not an attractive quality.”

 

She hands him back the sketchbook. “There’s this thing called _‘moving on’,_ Steve. You should consider it.”

 

Steve grits his teeth together and goes to put the sketchbook away. “Not my strongest suit.”

 

\---

 

Finding about fanart leads to finding about fanfiction.

 

He managed to scroll through hundreds of pieces of fanart without crying, but the first time he reads a heartbreakingly good fic about Bucky’s time in war pre-Azzano, about the letters he carefully crafts to send back home to Brooklyn (but which never reach Steve, who’s on his USO tour already), how he keeps his spirits up with the thoughts of getting home one day to Steve... Steve breaks down.

 

And it’s not the last time. But reading and crying feels cathartic. These people are giving him their versions of Bucky Barnes to mourn after. There are so many details wrong, but still Steve is hungry for more.

 

\---

 

Steve finds out about commissions, and drops few thousand dollars to request specific art pieces and fics from a whole bunch of his favourite creators.

 

He doesn’t know what to think when one of the authors replies politely and apologetic to him that his request for _‘amnesiac Steve Rogers with Bucky Barnes who doesn’t tell him about their past together’_ is _‘too AU’_ and _‘out of character’_ for them to work with. _‘Bucky would have never kept anything like that to himself,’_ the author says, _‘I appreciate your offer, but I just can’t think of a way to make your story work in a way that fits my headcanons and understanding of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. Here’s however a link to my friend’s account -- she writes all sorts of AUs.’_

 

Well. It’s a good reminder for Steve to not get too lost in these stories; these writers are all people who know even less about Bucky Barnes than Steve. Their stories may be able to touch Steve’s heart, their Bucks may be easy to fall in love with and care about, but he has to remember that these fics are _not_ actually real, they’re _not_ secret windows to his past.

 

\---

 

Steve ends up writing that story himself. He’s not much of a writer -- he’s good with speeches and drawing, but he’s quick to realize that creative writing is not his strong suit any more than _‘moving on’._

 

Still, he types until he has little over six hundred words of Steve Rogers hitting his head during a Howling Commando mission and forgetting all about Bucky Barnes. On a whim he uploads it on a fanfic site.

 

He leans back in his chair and looks at his computer screen. He’s darkly amused by it; there it is, on the internet, his secret real story -- or well, something very close to it. Anyone and everyone can read it! But hah, nobody will, because nobody knows it’s written by him -- and also because he probably screwed up something during the posting process.

 

\---

 

Well, he’s partly right -- after a week the story has got fifty hits, one kudos and two comments. The first comment says _‘:( tag for mcd pls’_ and the second one is by anonymous user who tells him to never again post anything, because his writing sucks and his characterization of Captain America is the worst the commenter has ever seen.

 

Steve deletes that comment and writes a second chapter with two hundred words, just out of spite. He doesn’t know what ‘mcd’ means, but figures that the first commenter was probably also just harassing him and that it’s one of those ‘memes’ he doesn’t know about. When he googles it, he gets just a bunch of hits about McDonald’s.

 

When the anonymous commenter appears again in the comment section of the second chapter like a shark, telling him to quit and not fill the internet with his trash, Steve laughs out loud for the first time in a long time. He decides to keep writing.

 

\---

 

He’s asked about his knowledge of his fandom in one Avengers interview.

 

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen some of the art and read a few fics,” Steve says easily, somewhat downplaying his obsessive collection of arts, fan videos, fan comics, and fics.

 

Pepper makes subtle _‘abort, abort’_ gestures to him from the back of the room.

 

“Oh really?” the interviewer asks, clearly delighted. “What did you think?”

 

“I loved them,” Steve says and smiles brightly. “Actually, I ended up writing a fic of my own too. I’m touched by how loyal readership it has gathered.” He now has three regular anonymous haters, although he suspects that it might be the one and the same person just upping their game.

 

The interviewer looks at him like she just got handed a jackpot. “Can you tell us more about your fic?”

 

“Sure. It’s a long multi-chapter work. I wanted to anonymously write about my experiences during the war--”

 

\---

 

“You’re such a troll,” Natasha says to him after he gets back from the interview (she and Clint refuse to take part of them) and they need to prepare for a new mission. “I’m impressed.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steve says mildly. “I didn’t lie about anything.”

 

Natasha gives him suspicious eyes. “Hmph.”

 

\---

 

Steve follows the speculation over which one of the highly popular, beautiful, ongoing fanfics is his. The consensus has become that it’s the 78k long gen-fic series started by _‘CptCaffeine’_ not long after his defrosting, since ‘CptCaffeine’ is one of the only ones who has refused to answer the question _‘Are you Captain Rogers?’,_ saying that they want to help preserve Steve’s anonymity that way.

 

It’s fun for a while to follow the forums, threads and discussions, but Steve gets uncomfortable thinking about the slight possibility of his fanfic getting found. It has now 213 hits, 3 kudos, and 45 comments from the hater(s), so he knows it’s not a very big probability, but still, he decides that he’s done with the joke and deletes all of it from the fansite (17 chapters and 4670 words in total).

 

He looks at his original sketch of mischievously smiling Bucky Barnes, which sits in its vintage frames next to his desktop, and he smiles a little -- for the first time with more peace than overwhelming pain and guilt -- and murmurs, “I think you would have enjoyed it. I wrote that dinosaur in just for you.”

 

Bucky doesn’t answer, just smiles at him from the sketch where he’s frozen forever in that one tiny moment, and there’s no fanfic or fanart in the world that Steve can unearth to tell him the definite answer to what Bucky Barnes would have thought about Steve’s ridiculous, spelling mistakes filled story (purposefully poor grammar antagonized his haters deliciously).

 

Steve turns off his computer and goes to change into his running clothes. He’s been up whole night, but he’ll feel better if he does his best to keep up to a daily routine.

 

\---

 

“Must have freaked you out coming back home after the whole defrosting thing, huh?” Sam Wilson says after getting up from the ground, still breathing heavy after ‘their’ run.

 

“It takes some getting used to,” Steve says, awkwardly but used to that kind of questions. It’s not people’s fault for thinking there ever was a ‘home’ for him to come back to, it’s not their fault for not knowing about Steve’s whole story. “It was good to meet you, Sam,” he says kindly and turns to leave.

 

But Sam stops him from leaving. And after a moment, Steve’s glad about it instead of a little annoyed. There’s something comforting in hearing that the man has been in military as well, and Steve catches himself wondering if maybe it’s time to start to live in this century. Make new friends outside his team. Not spend his days between missions only training and losing time in the internet.

 

Maybe that’s the best way to apologize for Bucky for what he did, and to show gratitude for saving Steve's life. James had never been a fan of Captain America, after all, and even if the shield is not something that Steve can just drop, maybe he should at least _try_ to be more than just an asset for the SHIELD.

 

For Bucky.

 

 

 

 


End file.
